Love Hard Work Hard Play Hard is named for Deanie Richardson’s motto about life. The album shows she clearly believes in bringing love, work, and play into her fiddling too.
Richardson, who is up for a Grammy this February as part of the all-female bluegrass group Sister Sadie, uses Love Hard Work Hard Play Hard to showcase all the genres and styles of fiddle she can play. There are plenty of bluegrass instrumentals, including a couple of originals, but there’s also a rag, a country song, an Irish folk medley, and a number of guest singers.
Patty Loveless absolutely steals the show. She and Richardson team up on a raw, protracted, string-and-vocal-only rendition of Jack Of Diamonds. It’s a devastating performance by two women at the top of their game letting out painful moans with their respective instruments that somehow is made stronger by a few harsh notes. Richardson a huge risk to put such a gut punch of a song onto an otherwise pleasant fiddle album. It pays off tremendously.
The other guest vocalists on Love Hard Work Hard Play Hard do a great job as well. Amanda McKenney and Brandon Bostic rock a slow-burning harmony on “East Virginia Blues” The country song, “Tears Will Be the Chaser for Your Wine,” reunites Richardson with her Sister Sadie bandmate Dale Ann Bradley. It’s fun to listen to them play around in a different genre.
Really, a lot of the album is fun. “Meadow Dancing” is a pleasant source of energy. Richardson sets a chaotic scene by suddenly speeding up the music in “Chickens in the House.” “Stoney Mae,” an original featuring the vocals of Ronnie Bowman, tells the story of a man in love with a scantily clad bartender, another man passing out drunk into a fire, and features a playful fiddle part. And “Lost Indian” (thankfully an instrumental given the song’s dated lyrics) is a fiddle tune with her brother Clyde clogging the beat. What kind of traditional American music fan doesn’t smile when they hear a Grand Ole Opry square dancer on percussion with his feet?
Richardson may put “play” behind love and work in her motto, but it’s just as important as the other two elements when it comes to making this album enjoyable.
Ahead of the release of Love Hard Work Hard Play Hard, I spoke with Richardson about the album, her Grammy nomination with Sister Sadie, and some of the artists she’s recorded and toured with.
Tell me about your song selection process for the latest album, because you’ve picked material spanning multiple genres and more than a century.
When I went into making this project, I knew I wanted this album to reflect my entire career since I started touring, which was when I was 15. I’ve been very blessed to have played bluegrass music, Irish music, rock and roll with Bob Seger, and country music with Patty Loveless and Vince Gill. There’s some bluegrass, which represents my time with the Coon Creek Girls and Sister Sadie. I have another band I’m in called the Likely Culprits, which is sort of a bluegrass/Americana/country that’s kind of anywhere and everywhere. So all those guys are on the record. And then my time with Patty Loveless, I’m still working with Patty, I’ve been with her for 25 years now. So wanted to have a song with her on the record where we just broke it down and featured her voice and my fiddle. I love her soulful, mournful sound and how heartfelt and emotional her singing is. I spent five or six years touring with The Chieftains and I wanted to bring some of that into the record. I wouldn’t consider myself an Irish fiddler, but I did spend some time in that genre and love that so very much and learned a lot from those guys.
One of my passions is old country music. I grew up around the Grand Ole Opry and I was always going backstage there when I was a kid. That is a true passion of mine and wanted a good country shuffle on there, so I got Dale Ann Bradley to sing it. My brother is a clog dancer on the Grand Ole Opry; he’s been doing that since he was 15 years old. I’ve always had this vision of recording the song with his feet, just his rhythms tapping out. During my time at the Grand Ole Opry, now I’m one of the staff members there, I’ve gotten to play a lot with and get really close to Mike Snider, who’s one of the members. I also grew up doing fiddle contests and I wanted even to go back that far. So there’s a couple of the tunes that I played when I was doing that when I was a kid.
Tell me what it feels like to have all of those different people come and take part in your solo project.
Well, it’s kind of overwhelming. It’s taken over a year to get it out and to get it recorded, and every person that I asked immediately said yes, that they would love to do that. And that for me reflects the ‘Love Hard’ part of this record. That’s kind of my life motto, Love Hard Work Hard Play Hard. And there was a lot of love on this record because I love each of these individuals a great deal and I feel their love back and everybody was very gracious. It’s a humbling, humbling thing to get to make living playing music and to get to do it with people that you just adore it takes it to the next level.
I just want to spotlight the Patty Loveless song in particular, because “Jack of Diamonds” is a showstopper on the album. I know a lot of what you hear on the album could fall under the category of ‘Play Hard,’ but that one is that one is a gut punch and a bit of a creative risk to go that raw.
I knew I wanted something with her vocal really edgy, and like you said, raw and something Appalachian sounding, she’s from eastern Kentucky, and something that was just would really feature the mournfulness and lonesomeness of her voice. Patty told me before that she doesn’t like to sing a song unless she can really feel it and put the emotion across to the audience. I love that about her. So I went to her and her husband and told them my idea. But we didn’t have a song yet so her husband, and also her producer, Emory Gordy, Jr., one of my musical heroes, started searching and I started searching. We passed songs back and forth on the computer for several months until he found this version of Jack of Diamonds. Now I knew Jack of Diamonds as a fiddle tune, but I had never heard this blues version by Blind Lemon Jefferson with just him and his guitar. I thought it would be really great to combine those two styles of the same song and it was just the perfect fit. We cut it live; we were in the same room basically looking at each other. I went down to her house and we got snowed in. The power was out and we had to cut the song on generator power at her house and it was just one of those moments for Patty in the studio. I’ve had many of those with her where you have your mouth just gaping open and you don’t know what to say so you just cry. It’s indescribable, really.
You’re also part of a project called Sister Sadie which happens to be nominated for a Grammy. How does that —
Crazy! It still feels surreal and unbelievable. We have this group text where all of five ladies of Sister Sadie keep up with what’s going on and chat. And it never fails, every day, somebody sends a text saying “you guys, were nominated for a Grammy!” We’re still in shock and in honored beyond belief. It’s been a dream of mine to even get to go to the Grammys at some point because I grew up watching that and just loving the bluegrass category and watching Mark O’Connor and Jerry Douglas and Sam Bush and Bela Fleck and all those guys winning back when I was a teenager. I just never dreamed that I would be nominated in one of those categories. We’re all going to go to L.A. We’re going to do the red carpet, we’re going to do the whole thing. So Sister Sadie’s pumped.
On your album cover, is that your arm with a tattoo that matches the f-hole on your fiddle?
It is. It is. I have f-holes on both my arms and the fiddle in the picture is the fiddle that I play and it is a fabulous instrument. It is an 1880 Collin-Mezin French fiddle and I bought it around 2006 when I was working with Vince Gill. I went into the violin shop here in Nashville and was looking at a case to buy to go on the road. And Fred Carpenter, the owner of the violin shop said “Deanie, you’ve got to play this fiddle I just got in” and I shouldn’t have done it, but I did. And then just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I went home, thought about it all weekend. It was a lot of money and just had very nervous feelings about spending that much money. So I called up Emory and talked to him about it and he’s like “you’ve got to go get this fiddle. You only you only do this once and you need the best that you can get to do it.” So I went back on Monday morning to get it. I love this fiddle so much, it speaks to me every time I play it. You can feel it in the depths of your gut when you just pull the bow across the strings. I wanted to get a tattoo, so I went and took that fiddle to the tattoo parlor and the guy traced the f-holes and then tattooed them on my arm. So I always get compliments or questions on the tattoos. So I thought that would be a good album cover.
1880! This is just a dorky little thing of mine, I enjoy it when old things have new purposes. I wonder what the people who originally crafted the fiddle would have thought if they knew that in more than a hundred years, a woman would have tattoos based on it and it would be playing this new genre of music in America. This fiddle predates bluegrass.
Yeah, like my thoughts every time I pick it up are whose hands have played this and how did it get here from France. It’s played folk music, classical music, whatever it’s played to get to me to play bluegrass, that’s a story in itself. I wish I knew all that every time I pick it up it. Seriously if you could ever hear it, it just goes right into you when you play it when you hear it.
And one last thing. You featured the voice of a baby on your original fiddle tune “Meadow Dancing”
She’s my 2-year-old granddaughter. I can hear her talking as we speak. She was playing on the floor one day and I had my fiddle out and she loves music. I had to get her a little fiddle for Christmas this year actually, so she’s good to go. And I was watching her play around and the melody just popped in my head as I’m playing and noodling around. It just felt playful. It felt like her. So I wrote the tune for her. And then while we were recording in the studio one day, Meadow was laughing so I had the engineer record her laugh. So that is truly her on it. Now every time we’re in the car she wants to hear it. So I play it for her and as soon as she hears the laugh, she says “again.”
Trevor Christian hosts the radio show Country Pocket on Long Island’s WUSB 90.1 FM, which can be streamed at wusb.fm
